Enjoy a little taste of my novel, Wake Up And Dream!

It was near dawn. Winter was only just starting to dig its teeth into the land, but it was cold, bitter; every breath seemed to crackle and shatter as soon as it escaped. There was a small clearing in the middle of a vast forest, far from civilization. The sounds of war could be heard somewhere miles away, carrying far in the icy air; thuds of mortars, peppering of machine gun fire echoing over the trenches, the hum of prop-driven biplanes. But here, in this clearing, they were muffled and obscured.

In the middle of the clearing was a boy. He was young, around sixteen, but with the tears streaming down his face he seemed even younger. He was alone, and very far from home. He was huddled over, naked, and shivering in the cold. A cloth name tag came blowing by in the wind, reading the name Henry Weaver. It had once belonged to him, stitched to the chest of his uniform before it, and so many other things, had been lost. He gave it no notice.

Scattered around the clearing, for dozens of yards, were bodies.

They were bodies of men he had fought with and fought against alike. The scene was one of gruesome carnage. Blood and viscera lay strewn all around, pieces of humanity barely recognizable as having once been human, shredded and splattered and blasted into viscous clumps. If anyone had come across this scene, they would have thought a great battle had occurred, or that some horrible weapon had been unleashed, a bomb, or a nest of machine guns.

But there had been no bomb, no weapon, no battle. Only him.

He dried his eyes for a moment, halted his weeping. He looked around at all of them, the corpses of fallen soldiers, this confetti of human remains. Men he had killed. Men whose family and friends would never know what had happened here, how they were torn to shreds, or blown apart, or met other fates too grisly to think about.

The boy fell again into a fit of heavy, wracking sobs, gasping for air. He screamed then, in rage and in shame. He screamed for the people whose lives he’d ended and for the horror he had brought upon the world. He pounded at the earth with his fists until they were raw, blood running thick and sticky over his fingers, until his hands were numb from the pain and from the cold.

He didn’t believe in any god, not anymore, but even so he prayed. He prayed for their souls and for his. He prayed for all of this to be nothing more than a terrible dream.